Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism